Ben Lerner dissects My Struggle, Books One, Two and Three for the London Review of Books:

“Reading Knausgaard is like the first time one looks at Google Earth: from space you can zoom in on the continent, then the country, then the town where you grew up; you can click on ‘street view’ and walk up to the house where you were born. It’s all there, just keep clicking, you might even see, one imagines, your younger self climbing a tree or disappearing around the corner on a BMX. Perhaps it’s less that we identify with the particular experiences Knausgaard recounts than that his writing makes us feel we might be able to recall our own past, near or distant, with all the texture and urgency of an inhabited present. This is why the extreme inclusiveness of Knausgaard’s attention – and the flatness of the language in which it’s conveyed – is so important: it feels universal, less interested in the exceptional life than in the way any life can feel exceptional to its subject (even if it sometimes feels exceptionally boring). Much of My Struggle isn’t a story so much as an immersive environment…a work of genius, a fictional farewell to literature.”

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